Fat Albert by Ray Cruz, used in all caps for the first paperback edition of The Power of Blackness, published as a Berkley Medallion book in November 1976. Portions of Jack Williamson’s novel first appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, Galaxy Science Fiction, and Amazing Science Fiction, before it was published in hardback by Berkley/Putnam in January 1976.

[More info on ISFDB]

Title page (detail)

Back cover

Berkley Medallion, 1970 (this printing from 1972). Cover artist unknown. [More info on ISFDB]

From Wikipedia:

Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians, and explores his interaction with and eventual transformation of Terran culture. […]

Stranger in a Strange Land won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel and became the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review’s best-seller list. In 2012, the Library of Congress named it one of 88 “Books that Shaped America”.

Shown here are two covers for Berkley’s paperback edition of “the best-selling underground novel by the dean of American science fiction writers.” The one depicted below came first, in 1968. In 1970, it was superseded by a new design, albeit with the same typography.

When used in caps, Karlgeorg Hoefer’s Permanent Headline (1964) can look a lot like Walter Haettenschweiler’s Schmalfette Grotesk (1954). It’s not quite as round, and the spine in S is less steep. Compare Schmalfette Grotesk to Permanent Headline.

Berkley Medallion, March 1968, with cover art by Paul Lehr. [More info on ISFDB]

Cover for the first edition of Starmind by David Van Arnam (1935–2002).

Benjy Tyler: idiot mind in a beautiful body; Jailyn Rost: very much a female, very rich, and very clever; Joe Winslow: multi-wave expert – caretaker and attendant on Asteroid 770. Whether they knew it or not, these three were linked--and in a way no humans had ever been before them. Only time would tell whether the link destroyed them.

[More info on ISFDB]

The title typeface is Streamline Block. This design is Franklin Gothic with two groups of five horizontal stripes. It was made by Monotype as series 407, with a limited character set (A–Z only), in a single size of 36pt. Sometime before 1972, VGC adopted it for phototypesetting, with the name shortened to Streamline. Here it’s paired with regular Franklin Gothic.

Emphyrio (Meulenhoff, 1973). Cover art by Paul Lehr. [More info on ISFDB]

Two Dutch paperbacks with science fiction stories by Jack Vance (1916–2013), published by Meulenhoff in 1973. Both cover designs use Colin Brignall’s Premier Shaded (Letraset, 1970) in interesting ways.

For Emphyrio, the initial E was elongated, and its top bar hyper-extended to form a roof above the rest of the word. With this modification, it looks a little like the shirorekhā, the horizontal bar that runs along the top in the Indic Devanagari script. The roof is crossed by the I which likewise has been enlarged. The type has been reversed, i.e. the shadow is lighter than the letter bodies, giving the words an incandescent look.

In Tschai, de Waanzinnige Planeet, the uncredited cover designer filled the letters with three different colors. They also used both the high-waisted and the low-waisted forms of A, which were included in Letraset’s sheets of rubdown type. While they realized that pairs like ‘LA’ and ‘AA’ would benefit from tighter letterspacing, they failed to eliminate the overlaps. Setting shadowed type with tight spacing is tricky, all the more so with dry transfer lettering. Phototypesetting services typically charged extra for such specifications, as it necessitated manual work. And it’s still is a challenge with digital fonts today.

Tschai, de Waanzinnige Planeet (Meulenhoff, 2nd edition from 1976, first published in 1973) is an omnibus volume with a Dutch translation of the four Tschai novels. The cover artist is unknown. According to Flickr user horzel, it’s painted after two paintings by Chesley Bonestell. [More info on ISFDB]

Captain Lee Ashby, USN, was ready to retire. He wanted no more adventures in his life, no more uncertainty. But he found himself taking command of the Vortex Rider, leading a crew whose makeup made no military or scientific sense, except as colonizers of a new planet – and they had no way of knowing whether the planet was already inhabited.

First paperback edition of Barnard’s Planet by John Boyd (1919–2013), published by Berkley Medallion in October 1976, using the art created by Paul Lehr for the hardcover edition.

Yagi Double appears with a colored inline. The Y with diagonals was included in the original glyph set.

[More info on ISFDB]

[More info on ISFDB]